June 20, 2009

There's been a minor trend in Hollywood lately towards getting live-action film rights for various popular Japanese cartoons: as they've already done (or are planning) movies for all the major American superheroes it makes sense to get your hands in some other properties before Well A runs dry. Unfortunately for all the studios, two big studio movies based on anime have come out and bombed: one was Speed Racer, which was awesome and everybody involved knew would tank, and the other was Dragonball: Evolution, which was fucking terrible and everybody involved knew would tank. I would dare speculate that the failure of Dragonball in particular has put some fear in the studio heads who've already put themselves behind other live-action anime projects, of which there are a few.

Well, gang, count one down. The Akira live-action film, which, if I recall correctly, has been on and off in the planning stages since the early 90s anime boom, is once again dead. This isn't to say that this particular movie's dead for good, or that the Ghost in the Shell and Robotech productions are doomed, but perhaps it signals a, shall we say, cautious attitude towards our beloved big-eye catgirl robot maid cartoons?

So is it a good thing or a bad thing that this trend seems to be getting finished before it started? I've already pre-emptively insulted all the people who want Hollywood to stay away from their anime forever (Nippon banzai wai wai sugoi kawaii), but it's not like I'm not cautious. On the one hand, "anime movie" could become the next "comic book movie": we could have a nice 20/80 ratio of quality to shit, and maybe a couple of those movies would be outstanding adaptations or even outstanding entertainment in their own right, completely apart from their source work. Maybe somebody would make a really good version of something shitty, like, I dunno, all those old Ohata OVAs. On the other hand, "anime movie" could become the next "video game movie", nearly all of which I have ignored and been better off for it.

The way I figure, Hollywood is just a total crapshoot, but I'd rather they take the 99-to-1 chance of making a decent movie than not take the shot at all. That said, you can usually tell whether the movie's gonna suck or not when they tell you who the director is and you take a look at his past work. And remember that sometimes, even terrible movies are salvageable, and you get a beautiful stroke of cosmic luck, like Raul Julia getting to play M. Bison.

Comments

I'm clearly crazy, I'd rather the studios invest in original productions, with interesting characters doing something unexpected and thrilling then do more 'we really like this so we're not using anything we liked except the name' movies, be they comic book, vidgame, anime or just plain remakes of existing films.

The problem with American live-action anime movies isn't necessarily the Americanization OR the live-action components. It's not at all hard to imagine scenarios where talented writers, directors, actors, and production teams can be paired with strong anime properties to produce unique but respectful takes on the source material.

No, the problem with live-action anime movies is the same problem that afflicts all major movie industries -- that being the silly political and commercial games that are played to determine who commands how much money to make what kind of movie. Meddling studio executives, corporate sponsorship, backfiring power plays by ambitious producers, celebrity egos clashing like yak craniums on the Russian steppes, that kind of thing. In this respect Hollywood is little different from the movie industry of Glorious Nippon -- in fact, Hollywood may even be better off, with a much higher representation of real talent relative to Japan's ocean of J-drama tripe and terrible C-grade action flicks. But of course, when you try to make a movie based on a Japanese property, you're faced not only with the standard song-and-dance of defying a highly commercialized medium to produce a transcendent (or at least noteworthy) film, but also with the problem of figurative and literal translation. Even if you have a saavy director or cast that gets the cultural/linguistic idiosyncracies at work in the source material, you have the added burden of explaining those quirks to the people bankrolling your movie, who may well demand questionable changes to better appeal to real or imagined domestic audience pettiness.

This, too, is a real shame, because I think when anime's really creatively explored (mostly in films, obviously), it comes up with some real gems. (mostly via directors like Otomo, Kon, and particularly Oshii) I would love to see how talented Western directors would approach a story like Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (silly high-school farce meets musing-on-reality-and-temporality a la Groundhog Day), but due to the very infrastructure of the Hollywood film industry, there's almost no chance of ever seeing such a film.